{"id":5864,"date":"2019-10-11T09:39:41","date_gmt":"2019-10-11T06:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africasustainabilitymatters.com\/?p=5864"},"modified":"2026-01-11T05:30:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T05:30:36","slug":"global-robotics-firm-chooses-rwanda-as-a-gateway-to-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/2019\/10\/11\/global-robotics-firm-chooses-rwanda-as-a-gateway-to-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Robotics Firm Chooses Rwanda As A Gateway To Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By James Karuhanga<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Fabrice Goffin, the Belgian owner of a company specializing\nin new robotics solutions, attended the just-concluded edition of Rwanda Day in\nBonn, Germany, he had just a little idea of how patriotic Rwandans are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ex-director of the World Trade Center in Antwerp, Belgium\nhad three months ago met Amb. Amandin Rugira, the Rwandan envoy to Belgium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was interested to introduce my company in Africa but didn\u2019t\nknow if it would be possible,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The envoy then invited him to the embassy where he demonstrated\nwhat his robot can do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goffin\u2019s company, ZoraBots, does business with countries from\nAsia, Europe, North America, and South America but not in Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But on Saturday when he attended Rwanda Day, Goffin was inspired\nby the positive energy Rwandans demonstrated in their attempt to find solutions\nto the issues challenging their country\u2019s development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He promised to visit Rwanda in November. When he visits, Goffin\nwill be exploring options for how to launch operations in Rwanda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy wish is to introduce robotics in Africa through Rwanda,\u201d he\nsaid. \u201cZoraBots Rwanda would be the first company to offer robots to serve\nhumans in Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It could be that there is service robotics in countries such as\nSouth Africa, he noted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But they are not to the extent of his company\u2019s services where\nmuch is based on engineering and there are operational robots in different\nsegments of daily life; hospitals, retailers, hotels, among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cZoraBots is unique in the world when it comes to doing that. We\neven have the Japanese state as (our) customers. Unlike all the other\nrobots that we know, a service robot is like a humanoid robot that serves\nhumans\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It can be used in shops, relay information or in hospitals to\nmotivate children to do exercises and in schools to teach programming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even drones such as the ones Rwanda uses to deliver blood, Goffin\nnoted are not service robots in his view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His idea of service robots is\nthe ones that are \u201chumanoid looking\u201d with Artificial Intelligence (AI) or\nmachine intelligence cable of detecting humans and talking with them or promote\nproducts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cService robots are providing\nservices as humans do but by taking over repetitive tasks, they can assist\nhumans and give them more time to do more important things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea behind his Rwanda\nproject, he said, is to make it the African headquarters for ZoraBots\noperations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are going to seek a\nbusiness developer in order to introduce what the robots can do in hospitals,\nschools, and retail shops. Not to take jobs away from people but to assist\nhumans in repetitive tasks and to help children learn about programming. This\nis the future for children,\u201d Goffin said\u2026Read more>><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By James Karuhanga When Fabrice Goffin, the Belgian owner of a company specializing in new robotics solutions, attended the just-concluded edition of Rwanda Day in Bonn, Germany, he had just a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}